The reason for these
recent “attacks” by the Canadian government, according to Rangel, is the need
by the North American country to hide its links with “los mexicanos” and their role
in the increase of drug trafficking to the United States via Canada.

The attacks by Canada
also include the use of its embassy in Caracas to smuggle intelligence operatives
into Venezuela. According
to Rangel, in the last month, “approximately 30 agents specialized in
destabilization activities,” have entered the country through the Canadian
Embassy.

Sunday, October 19, 2014

The Minister
for the Communes, Elias Jaua, claims that the Governor of Miranda and
opposition Henrique Capriles will travel this month to Spain and to Miami in
order “receive instructions and financial oxygen to continue the
destabilization campaign against Venezuela’s democracy.”

Jaua mentioned Roger
Noriega as one of the “ultra-rightists” Capriles will meet during his trip.

“It’s a lie that
Capriles is one of the more moderates of the opposition,” said the Minister, “he
is part of the game being played to interrupt democracy, part of the plan of
destabilization against our Fatherland.”

Jaua is especially
concerned that Capriles could be using Miranda State’s public resources to
finance his travels and conspiracies against the government: “We have decided,
the National Government, the Parliament, the Regional Parliament [of Miranda],
the regional deputies, the city mayors of Miranda, and the Popular Power, to begin
a process of debate on the use of resources that have been constitutionally transferred
to the State of Miranda, and we will ask Carpiles for an explanations of his
travels,” warned he, and added, “we will battle to stop Capriles from using his
post of Governor to further his personal interests and his ambition and obsession
to become the president.”

(The Agencia Venezolana de Noticias exceptionally
publishes images of opposition leaders to illustrate negative comments. This is
a rare case of an image of Capriles taken from AVN.)

Saturday, October 18, 2014

President Maduro has
announced that the “intellectual authors” behind the murder of PSUV leader
Robert Serra have been discovered. He gave no names, but said that if “we [the government]
want peace we have to discover these criminal terrorists and go after de Right
every day.”

“We already know who
directed and gave the order to murder our dear martyr Robert Serra, the
Venezuelan youth is not afraid of terrorism,” assured Marduro to a crowd of
followers.

The president said
that new evidence was popping up every day, but that he had already explained
the three main reasons for the crime: “The first was to kill a young leader,
[the second] was to frighten the youth, and the third is that this murder was
part of a series of events to plunge our country into violence and chaos.”

After several
announcements by the president that he would present the evidence of the
conspiracy, yesterday he showed
a video taken by security cameras the night of the crime. Six men can be
seen walking into Serra’s residence. Maduro said all have been identified. One
of them is Torres Camacho, Serra’s main body guard. Another man named Leive
Padilla, alias “El Colombiano”, was identified by Maduro as a “known Colombian
paramilitary.”

Maduro
then explained that, despite “national and international versions that were
prepared before the crime and that seek to undermine the investigations,” this
was a “terrorist act” with the aim of destabilizing the country. Next week, he
said, he will present to the United States government evidence linking the
crime to “terrorist groups” based in Miami.

Maduro also showed a
different video suggesting links between Álvaro Uribe Vélez, Lorent Saleh,
Carlos Berrizbetia, and Leopoldo López. All of them presented in the video as responsible
for the opposition protests early this year, the murder of Robert Serra, and
also the murder of chavista leader
Eliécer Otaiza.

On this last case
Maduro repeated his argument that Otaiza was murdered by the conspirators but
that the police has still to find the missing link in the case: “we are
searching for the key piece in Otaiza’s case, let’s hope it exists,” he added.

Maduro made several
other revelations: unknown to public opinion the president of the National
Assembly suffered an assassination attempt on October 4. The Minister of
Education Héctor Rodríguez was also the target of an attempt on October 1.
Maduro gave no further details or evidence of these claims, but he said they
constituted part of a series of “continued coups” defeated by the government.
He also
assured that the murder of Robert Serra has “awakened that humanist consciousness
of all of the Venezuelan people.”

However, also
yesterday, National Assembly member and leader of the PSUV Freddy Bernal seemed
to contradict Maduro’s version, and his own previous
declarations, and stated that the murder of Robert Serra was the result of
a “disagreement” with his own bodyguard, who hired a gang of common criminals
to plan the assassination.

Wednesday, October 15, 2014

The “Red de
Defensores y Defensoras de la Seguridad y la Soberanía Alimentaria,” was established
by Venezuelan government with the aim of “fighting the scourge of hoarding
and speculation.”

The Red has issued a video
explaining how the Economic War works. According to the narrator, the Economic
War “disappears” (the “Economic War” being the agent) essential products from
the market in order to gain more profits and to sabotage the revolutionary
government.

The evidence that the
problem is not one of controls and lack of production, according to the Red, is
that essential products never entirely disappear from shelves; they are only
partially “removed” by the war in order to generate dissatisfaction among the
population.

It is all part of a “political
campaign” to topple the government, explains the video. As part of this
campaign business owners “are in a state of rebellion against the Law of Fair
Costs and Prices which seeks to regulate the prices of the products that are indispensable
for households.”

As a solution the Red
proposes a communal economy of “social property businesses, where the worker
will be the owner and will enjoy all the benefits, different from the
capitalist [property businesses] where profits go to only two or three people.”

Monday, October 13, 2014

Former Caracas Mayor
and National Assembly representative PSUV insisted on the government’s
version that the assassination of Robert Serra was politically motivated
and an act of terrorism. He even knows how long it took to plan the murder:
exactly two months.

“The murder of Robert
Serra was planned for two months. The attackers found the weak points of [Serra’s]
security team and that allowed a foreign actor to have access [to him],” declared
Bernal.

Serra was murdered
with viciousness [saña] and this
fact, according to Bernal, constitutes evidence that the crime had the purpose of
causing terror: “I am almost sure that the assassination of Robert Serra was a premeditated
act to cause terror.”

Bernal also
warned that acts like this could happen again in the future and indirectly
blamed the opposition for the crime: “I ask the serious opposition that, no
matter what our political differences might be, we don’t kill each other.”

He also said that
Colombian ex-president Álvaro Uribe is “obsessed with Venezuela” and that he
was looking to “generate political links” with the Venezuelan opposition,
especially with Leopoldo López and Henrique Capriles.

According to Bernal
this “whole lobby” also includes president Obama who is, for his part, obsessed
with jailed opposition leader Leopoldo López: “Because Obama has so many
problems in the world, he has Leopoldo López in his mind.”

Wednesday, October 8, 2014

Early July this year was
the
last time the government claimed that there was an extensive plot to
assassinate president Maduro. The
recent murder case of the National Assembly representative Robert Serra
seems to be reviving claims of “selective killings,” and Maduro
suggested yesterday that the list of supposed targets could be longer.

Despite recent
police investigations that point to Serra’s security
circle, Maduro insisted that the murder of the PSUV leader had political
motives and that it’s part of a series of selective killings which could next
target “a very important leader of the Revolution.”

Tuesday, October 7, 2014

José
Vicente Rangel believes that “every day the existence of a double and
sordid plot [conjura] against Venezuela
is becoming more evident.”

The “double” character
of the plot comes from the fact that it combines conspiracies plotted outside
the country and local agents of the opposition.

“The link between
internal factors, the political opposition, financial agents, media, and international
powers has never before had this operational capacity and clarity in its
objectives,” wrote Rangel for the local newspaper Últimas Noticias.

This high degree of
coordination “has lethal effects that affect citizens in their daily life,” he
explained. “What is plotted ordered from the outside, immediately effects
inside [of the country].”

Saturday, October 4, 2014

On Wednesday night PSUV National Assembly representative, Robert Serra
and his assistant Maria Herrera, were found murdered inside their house in La
Pastora, Caracas.

Reactions from
government officials were at first cautious: Interior Minister Miguel Rodríguez
Torres declared that investigations were under way and asked for patience. The
president of the National Assembly, Diosdado Cabello, and the Mayor of
Libertador, Jorge Rodríguez, both asked chavistas
to remain calm, trust the authorities, and let the police investigation follow
its course.

But other government
officials began pointing to “political motives” and blaming the opposition for
the crime almost the moment it was made public. The second vice-president of
the National Assembly, Blanca Eekhout (@blancaePSUV) tweeted that same night:
“Coward and murderer bourgeoisie, today they again spills the blood of young
patriots.” In a press conference early Thursday, Eekhout again blamed the “fascists” for the murder: “The fascist murderers
that want to sow fear and despair are very wrong. The best antidote for fear is
the deep faith, courage, valor, and strength of our people.”

PSUV deputy Eduardo Piñate also hinted at the responsibility of the opposition: “We
appreciate the condolences by the opposition, but we also tell them that they
are responsible, in one way or another, that things like this are happening in
Venezuela, because the sicariato is
imported from Colombia, through Gómez Saleh, and all that importation has been
made in order to destabilize and demoralize the revolutionary lines.”

The Secretary General
of UNASUR, Ernesto Samper (@ernestosamperp), added fuel to the Colombian
infiltration theory by tweeting: “The murder of the young deputy Robert Serra
in Venezuela is a worrying sign of the infiltration of Colombian
paramilitarism.”

A few hours after his
first cautions declarations, Minister Rodríguez Torres revealed the first results of a police investigation which he
qualified as “based on the principles of maximum experience in criminal
investigation.” The results of this investigation, said the Minister, showed
that “The death [of Serra] was the product of a macabre assignment. (…) We are
in the presence of an intentional homicide, planned and executed with great
precision,” he added.

Also on Thursday president
Maduro declared that sicarios
were behind the murders and that “the investigations are advancing more than we
can reveal at this moment. The criminalistics evidence is in line for the
identification of the material authors of the crimes. At this time, after
talking to the Interior Minister Rodríguez Torres, I can say that we are near hitting
hard a band of sicarios.”

But by Friday Maduro
decided it was time to directly point the finger at the “intellectual authors”
of the crimes, which according to him could include Colombian ex-president
Álvaro Uribe acting with a “criminal band created in Miami and protected by the
gringo Empire.”

Maduro also argued
that the local “ultra-right” is trying to create and “opinion matrix” linking
the murder of Serra to common crime. But that, he explained, “is part of their
calculations.” Maduro’s interpretation is that, because government security
forces had “detained several persons between Monday and Wednesday who were
planning to burn cities such as Valencia and Maracay,” the “fascist minds” had
changed theirs plans to the selective killing of government officials. “Fascism
decided to kill Robert Serra. This is a terrorist escalation that they have
been planning for a long time,” he said.

The president of the
National Assembly, Diosdado
Cabello, also went beyond his first cautionary remarks and on Friday
declared that the crime was a message sent to intimidate the chavista people and the revolution.
Cabello argued that this was no common crime, but that instead “here [we are
facing] fascism acting against the Bolivarian Revolution and the people. (…) We
are in the presence of a crime committed by political sicariato. It is a message to frighten our young people so as to
keep them off the streets. It is the same historical format used by the right
and by Imperialism to make our heroes go into hiding. They did it with Miranda
[Venezuelan independence hero].”

Cabello insisted that
nothing happens by chance, and as an example he made a reference to the “inoculated
cancer” theory about Chávez death: “The fascist right hides everything behind
common crimes. But the numbers don’t add up statistically ¿why are all the dead
chavista [leaders]? That’s the same
thing as all the presidents of Latina America of the left having cancer. That
is not [statistically] possible.”

Wednesday, October 1, 2014

During a military ceremony yesterday, Maduro explained that the new “military doctrine” of
Venezuela is a legacy of Chávez, and is based on anti-imperialist principles in
order to face what he claims is a permanent strategy of aggression against
Venezuela expressed through economic, psychological, and mercenary wars.
According to Maduro the opposition protests of the beginning of this year are
no more than “neo-fascist actions of the extreme right” backed by the Empire.

Caracas, 30 Sep.
AVN.- The President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro,
denounced Tuesday that the strategy of division of the people, and the placing
of violent groups, that the Empire applies in countries such as Syria, Iraq, Ukraine,
is the same that it tried to impose on Venezuela during the first semester of
the year with the neo-fascist actions of the right.

“Venezuela was the
object of an aggression by internal, pro-imperialist forces. These forces, in
other places of the world such as Ukraine, Syria, and Iraq, have accomplished
their objectives of harming the people,” expressed the president during a
ceremony commemorating the ninth anniversary of the Strategic Operational
Command of the National Armed Forces (CEOFANB).

He indicated that “Syria
was almost filled with heavily armed terrorist groups and bands financed by the
governments of NATO, particularly by the United States, and they raised a
monster, similar to the Taliban in Afghanistan, or Al-qaeda.”

These terrorist cells
were “created, funded, and armed by the United States Empire and NATO in the
Shia regions of Syria, Iraq, and all of the Middle East. But who created this
monster?”

(…)

The president also
mentioned the conflict in Ukraine, “where neo-Nazi forces have been encouraged,
are the heirs of those who did not want Ukraine to form part of the USSR and,
at that time, welcomed Hitler’s troops.”

(…)

Maduro explained that
the characteristics of the conflicts in the countries he mentioned are the same
that the extreme right tried to implement in Venezuela under the name of “la salida”, which was no more than a “violent
and neo-fascist attack against democracy and the Venezuelan people, with the
objective of positioning violent groups [inside the country] and beginning a
process of division of the country, its dismemberment.”

He stressed that “thanks
to the institutional and humanist cohesion of our government, our State, the
Armed Forces, the CEOFANB, and the people, peace was triumphant in our country.”
However he urged all Venezuelans, and the military, to “be fully conscious of
the steps taken by the violent sectors and of the things we have accomplished.”

“The new body of the
Republic is being built in the midst of these battles, and the new muscle, for transcending
the times, becomes stronger with every battle. The battle against the guarimbas [street barricades] and the
violent attempts to disintegrate [the country] have been won.”

He also urged for the
continuation of the political and institutional development of the country,
free “from the violent surge and the destruction of these groups nourished by
Colombian paramilitarism.”